It is known to provide user access to secure computer systems through password-entry methods and systems. In a password access scheme, a user gains access to secure systems, services or data (“secure resource”) by providing an appropriate password to a secure user interface through a login procedure, wherein the access granted is typically based upon access rules associated with the password. Thus, in general, the security of the secure resource system is dependent upon password security.
However, it is sometimes desirable for authorized parties to provide access to secure resources to non-authorized users, for example to present or potential business clients and customers, or to other employees or agents within a common employment or agency context. Accordingly, it is known for authorized users to provide their passwords to non-authorized parties to enable them to login and access a secure resource, which creates a number of problems.
First, providing a confidential password to an unauthorized third party user necessarily destroys the confidentiality of the password, even where the third party access is intended to be of only a temporary nature. Once lost confidentiality cannot be recovered, and security must generally be reestablished through removal of recognition of the compromised password and creation of a new password. This creates inefficiencies through imposing additional administrative requirements on secure system administration and on the authorized user.
Secondly, neither the authorized user nor a system administrator entity may be able to monitor or control the extent of the secure resource access granted to the unauthorized third party. The third party may appear to the system as the authorized party and enjoy his full rights and access privileges, though perhaps only a subset of the secure resources were intended to be provided, or over a limited timeframe or other limited access basis. Thirdly, since the third party has logged on as the authorized user there may be no means to differentiate and track respective authorized party and unauthorized third party accesses to secure resources, and thus misappropriation or other abuse of resource access may be wrongfully attributed to an innocent authorized user.
Problems also arise where a secure resource provider system must provide different degrees of resource access to different users. More particularly, it is common for some authorized users to enjoy limited levels of security permission for access to secure server resources relative to others: for example access to employee social security numbers may be restricted to only a defined first user or group of users. And the number of different levels and permissions that must be administered may increase greatly, and with increasing complexity, for network server resources serving client application users over the Internet. For example, large financial services providers may need to provide network access to secure resources to thousands of individual account holders each located within one or more of a plurality of divergent governmental jurisdictions, each of which may impose their unique administrative requirements on a service provider. Under the prior art, secure server administration must be configured to meet all known unique user access or administration requirements, and must generally be scalable to serve new additional requirements as needed. Thus, differentiated service provision imposes large costs and inefficiencies when implemented and administered at the server level.